October 2007

The Evolver

(Page 4 of 4)

He talked about Social Security, saying, “I’m going to spend the political capital necessary to fix it.” He agreed with Cogan’s comment that budget surpluses usually ended up getting spent by Congress: “Yeah, that’s a problem with all legislative bodies, isn’t it?” He expressed great interest in India, which none of them had expected of a Texas governor. For several minutes he listened intently as Shultz, Boskin, and Rice debated whether or not the International Monetary Fund should be reformed or abolished altogether. And though he asked numerous questions, the Hooverites noticed that he did not frame them as “What should I do?” but rather “Here’s what I’d do. What do you think?”

When it was over, Shultz rather giddily took Bush aside. He told him that back in 1979, after Reagan’s talk had concluded, Shultz had brought him to the very spot where they now stood and said, “Run. We will support you.” And now, Shultz said, he wished to say the same thing to Bush.

“The thing is,” the governor said, “I have to be sure that my family’s comfortable with it. Also, I want to make sure there are significant things that I want to accomplish as president.”

Which only made Shultz giddier: My God, just like Reagan. An agenda president.

“I’m just not gonna do this,” said Bush one summer afternoon to Hughes as the two of them drove to an interview in Dallas. “I want my girls to have a normal life.”

He was genuinely torn: flattered by all the Republicans showing up at his door but remembering well how the daily muggings of his father’s 1992 campaign had left every Bush gasping on the mat. Why go through it again? He didn’t need this.

His 1998 gubernatorial campaign was at once a silly formality and overwrought with portent. Even though he was a million points ahead of Garry Mauro, he was still out there, sweating completely through his clothes at a diner in Beaumont. Was he just restless? Running up the score to qualify for the big tournament? National reporters tailed him everywhere. The Democratic National Committee was giving Mauro all the support necessary to at least knock Bush down a notch. Meanwhile, and very quietly, a Dallas attorney named Harriet Miers was overseeing an extensive in-house opposition research effort, gathering all the goods against her friend George W. Bush so as to be ready for the onslaught.

This, of course, included the DUI incident in 1976. “What do you think we should do about this?” Hughes asked Bartlett and campaign press secretary Mindy Tucker one day.

The two agreed: Get it out there. If that’s the worst there is, we can deal with it.

But Bush had already made his decision. While submitting to jury duty, the governor was approached by a reporter who asked, “Were you ever arrested for drunken driving?”

“I did a lot of stupid things when I was young,” Bush replied.

He left it at that. Bush’s daughters were just beginning to drive at the time. “I’d made a conscious decision not to spend time talking to them about stupid things I’d done,” he would later say. “And so I made the decision there on the spot—this is without any consultation, not sitting around with the Bartletts or the Hugheses of the world on how to handle it.”

Rove would regard his failure to change Bush’s mind on the subject as his biggest mistake of the presidential campaign.

The gears began to whirl on November 3, 1998. Mike Boskin began to prepare briefing books on every national issue. Straining at the leash of strategic ambiguity, Rove’s mind thrashed as he contemplated the primaries before the primaries, the primary of money, the primary of ideas: Gotta show that we’re innovative and for God’s sakes prudent … he’s only dealt with state economic issues, his foreign policy’s limited to Mexico … gotta blow out his four big issues to national scale … need a policy shop, building on what we did with Judge Gaither and Sandy Kress and Marvin Olasky … bring ’em in, let ’em teach, but let ’em also be impressed, like the Hooverites, they’ll be part of our cheerleading squad …

Bush’s language had changed, leaning more toward yes—“I’m thinking very seriously about it,” “Keep your powder dry”—but even with decision-making time absolutely upon him, the man who seven years later would refer to himself as the Decider was anything but. And though Laura had come on board—in many ways showing less reluctance than she’d displayed before the gubernatorial campaign—the girls were in revolt. They’d seen how the press lampooned Chelsea Clinton. How could a father put a daughter through such humiliation?

“My attitude was ‘Someday you’ll understand why,’ ” Bush would recall of these impasses. “Laura did a lot of that too.” The twins did not go quietly. Shortly after the election, an adviser visiting the mansion could not help overhearing the governor upstairs having a yelling match with Jenna. The issue was whether or not his daughter could spend Thanksgiving with friends in Mexico. The father was trying to explain that, considering what was at stake here, gallivanting off to Mexico might not be a very good idea.

Jenna responded with her own unbiased prognostication: “It’s not like you’re gonna win!”

The morning of Governor Bush’s second inaugural ceremony, he sat with his family in an Austin church for what he had assumed would be an obligatory prayer service. But Pastor Mark Craig had something else in mind. People are starved for leadership, the pastor declared. Starved for leaders who have ethical and moral courage … And it’s not always easy or convenient for leaders to step forward. Even Moses had doubts …

“He was talking to you!” Barbara stage-whispered into her eldest son’s ear at the conclusion of the service. And though ever-modest Laura countered with “He was talking about all of us,” Bush was in the full throes of epiphany. Like that, the pastor’s words became the godly hands that pushed him clean off the prepresidential bubble.

Bush declared his exploratory committee open for business in March of 1999, at which point the very shadow of his candidacy began to suck the life out of campaigns already in progress. In the first 120 days of the campaign, his finance chieftains Don Evans and Jack Oliver worked the moneyed faithful, hoping to raise around $20 million. Before long, FedEx boxes full of checks began to accumulate in the office of Oliver’s assistant, Kate Walters, stacked up like missiles in a silo. On the first of July, at a campaign stop in San Jose, California, Bush announced the tally, to astonished gasps: $37 million. (“That’s three times the amount my dad raised,” he later pointed out to a family friend.)

Back in Austin, the governor presided over one last legislative session, adding another $1 billion tax cut to his portfolio. He showed up late to the August Iowa straw poll competition and rolled over the opposition anyway, ten points ahead of Steve Forbes. Then he returned home, to meetings at the mansion with the nation’s most prominent conservative economists, domestic policy innovators, and foreign affairs sages. He was getting schooled, but so were they. The governor’s “useful impatience,” as one participant would put it, was ever on display. He delighted in his ability to outwit the brainiacs, drilling down to profound simplicity with questions like “What do we have an army for, anyway?” and never letting these big thinkers forget who was in charge. During one dinner meeting at the mansion to discuss economic policy, Bush led off by saying, “If the American people wanted an economist for president, you guys would be running and not me. But they don’t.”

Fortified with big thoughts and deployed with exquisite choreography by Rove, Bush would materialize in Los Angeles or Indianapolis or Charleston or some other carefully chosen venue and, amid a riot of TV cameras, roll out some new proclamation of Bush policy. The speeches, penned by newly hired scribe Mike Gerson, were freighted with detail and lofty allusions and in some other context would have seemed pompous. But this was a campaign already starched up as a presidency—so inevitable, so forceful and precise as to almost appear preexisting, as if George W. Bush, the governor of the nation’s second-largest state, had practically been running the nation for some time already. As if this man who would presume to improve upon an era of Peace and Prosperity had already passed all the requisite tests.

Which, you could say, he had.

For he had started at the bottom of the oil business and wound up a rich man (a test of his entrepreneurship … or of his extraordinary connections).

He had distinguished himself as a dynamic co-owner of a baseball team (a test of his executive shrewdness … or of his cheerleading skills).

He had waged a successful underdog campaign against a popular governor (a test he inarguably passed … or which Ann Richards and the Democratic party indisputably failed).

And he had become a bold and popular governor (whose agenda depended on the efforts of the far more powerful Democratic leadership).

These were the tests George W. Bush had passed with flying colors. He’d made it all look easy. None of it was easy.

None of it was enough.